Thank you too. And happy New Year to all.maiforpeace wrote:I think one Seth is enough for me...Seth wrote:Thank you my dear.apophenia wrote:Actually, personalities aside, I would be happy to see more Seth's here. This community lacks diversity. Though I haven't visited enough forums to actually compare it to other comparable forums.But I do very much appreciate the diversity he adds.
Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Well, he's just someone who can't take a joke and can't hold up his end of a debate without getting all pissy about it and blaming everyone else for his failures in reason.amused wrote:We had two Seths with Schneibster, and look how well that worked out.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
© 2013/2014/2015/2016 Seth, all rights reserved. No reuse, republication, duplication, or derivative work is authorized.
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Yes, but with the two of them we had two people with opposing views insisting that they haz 'The Truth' and must not be silenced!maiforpeace wrote:Schneibster is Shneibster, he's definitely not two Seths.amused wrote:We had two Seths with Schneibster, and look how well that worked out.
It was sort of matter meets anti-matter. I don't know if the forum containment vessel could handle three or more...
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Successful guerilla ontology needs a level of finesse which takes time to master, so I have to hand it to you on that, though I'd be interested to see your experiments in such upon different communities, if indeed that IS what you are up to.Seth wrote:Isn't it just...Audley Strange wrote:Oh I don't think it's himself he's parodying, however I agree, when he's on form he can be very funny. I assume the intent is that of satirical reflection but if he's genuinely serious (which I have never been given any reason to assume) then the joke is even funnier.amused wrote:Seth is a parody of himself.
His own words are the worst advertisement for his own views.
When viewed with that squint, he's very funny.
And I'm afraid watching people getting their panties in a bunch with him almost on cue is even funnier and has been for years.![]()
It's a rare talent, really.
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Then following your line of reasoning, and using your logic, the preponderance of the evidence must be that the Poetic and Prose Edda are true. Is that correct?Seth wrote:I don't have any. Nor have I ever claimed to have any such evidence. I'm just analyzing your arguments, logic and reason for the claims you make. That's it.Coito ergo sum wrote:And, one might just as well ask what Seth's critically robust evidence is that the writers of the Poetic and Prose Edda and the Heimskringla did not accurately recount events as they actually occurred based on his careful investigation is....???apophenia wrote:Well isn't that special. Unfortunately the question it was testifying against was not "are the Gospels true," but rather are they eyewitness testimony. So your rejoinder is not even relevant.And your critically robust evidence that Luke did not accurate recount the events as they actually occurred based on his careful investigation is....???
And, I love how Seth assumes, without any critically robust evidence, that Luke did a "careful investigation." Where, Seth, is your critically robust evidence that Luke made a careful investigation, or that he even wrote the book of Luke?
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Doesn't matter, he'll still ignore it.
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
The Bible is not a transcription of events. Again, that could only occur if the person writing the writings we have now was the actual witness of the event. The Bibles we have now are:Seth wrote:So? What's your evidence that the transcription of events is false or incorrect? Your incredulity is not evidence, I'm afraid...still.Coito ergo sum wrote:
A nice, concise phrasing of my point that each of the various versions of the different Bibles are hearsay within hearsay within hearsay.
We don't HAVE an eyewitness. We have a person writing a book who claims that someone else witnesses something. Not only that, we don't have the original writing. So, we have an unknown scribe, who may or may not have accurately copied a manuscript, that may or may not have been the original manuscript, by an unknown original author, who was writing down what he either thought up himself or was reported to him happened decades before the writing occurred.
That is not "eyewitness testimony." Eyewitness testimony is, axiomatically, testimony of an eyewitness. We don't have that. We have a decades after the fact report, written by a person who wasn't there, writing about events AT BEST reported to him, and we don't know who the writer was. That writing was supposedly copied, and the original subsequently lost.
Translations of prior versions, where the original versions are lost;
The original versions were written by someone who wasn't a witness to the events
Based on at least 2nd, if not 3rd, 4th and 5th hand reports.
So, what is my evidence that the original writer was accurately told what happened by someone who wasn't actually there what happened at certain events that occurred decades prior? And, then what is my evidence that the subsequent scribes accurately re-wrote the events?
Well, I can tell you that at least some of the passages of the Bible have been shown to have been added in later in subsequent revisions. I can tell you that there are literally dozens of versions of the Bible, each of which contain some differences, some major and some minor. The Catholic versions for example, have 5 books in them that the Protestant versions do not have, and there are portions of other books that are in the Catholic Bible that are not in the protestant bible versions.
So, I do have strong evidence that the Bible versions are not completely accurate recitations of either what happened or what certain 2d and 3rd hand retellers of Bible stories reported or said happened.
It's not my "incredulity" - it's the facts of what the Bible is. Your mischaracterization of the various versions of the Bible as a recitation or transcription of events made by an "eyewitness" is simply false. That's not what the Bible is. As I noted, the Bible is a rewriting of stories which were previously written down, but the original writings are long lost, and we know that some of the Bible versions we now use were later additions to the texts. Thus, we know that current Bible versions are not exactly the same as earlier Bible versions - we don't know what the full extent is. We also know that that none of the actual alleged witnesses to the events in the Bible had any part in writing it down, but we do know that a game of Chinese Whispers was played over decades until certain books of the Bible were written down in different decades after the events. So, a scribe wrote down what he was told by people who were not there, then we know things were changed about that writing by later scribes, and then the original versions were discarded or lost. Then we know that many other scribes rewrote the passages differently, making various changes along the way, so now we have dozens of Bible versions telling stories differently to some extent.
That's pretty good evidence that the Bible can't be trusted to be, at a minimum, a completely accurate telling or retelling of tales told by non-witnesses of events they heard from third parties....
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
"What's your evidence that the transcription of events is false or incorrect? " 

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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Eyewitness testimony, to be EYEWITNESS testimony, must be testimony of an eyewitness. Number one, we're not talking about "testimony" at all, since nobody is under oath. Testimony requires someone to be testifying - well at least when we are talking about "issues at bar," which is the phrase you used.Seth wrote:
Sure it is. You just want "eyewitness testimony" to be first-person in nature,
Now, eyewitnesses are people who actually saw the events. Someone can recount eyewitness testimony, like when the police officer writes a report at the scene and Joe Shmo says that he saw the traffic light was red. Joe Shmo is the eyewitness, though, the scribe is not.
In the case of the Bible, Joe Shmo's "testimony" is, at a minimum, being told by Richard Roe, who is telling the scribe that Joe Shmo said he saw the light was red. That is NOT eyewitness testimony. That is, at best, Richard Roe's earwitness testimony about what Joe Shmo said. That's different. In the case of most of the Bible, the number of persons between Joe Shmo and the scribe is innumerable, and we don't know if it's 2 or 4 or 100, but it certainly is not Joe Shmo writing the document and it is certainly not a scribe hearing it directly from Joe Shmo. Hence it is not testimony of an eyewitness to the events.
This is where you are screwing up.Seth wrote: but that's not the point at all. You're getting all tied up in whether the Gospels are true or not when the only issue at bar at the moment is whether it is rational for someone to conclude that God does not exist based on an absolute and complete absence of any evidence whatsoever that supports such a claim.
Nobody is saying there is an "absolute and complete absence of any evidence whatsoever." Everyone has an open mind, open to be convinced of the proof, which may exist on the third planet to the left in the Andromeda galaxy, or wherever. The point is that there is no eyewitness testimony, and the Bible doesn't constitute evidence (not by the definition I and anyone else here is using, except for you). However, if we treat things like the Bible AS evidence, arguendo, then it amounts to piss poor evidence, and is not "critically robust" such that a conclusion can be rationally drawn in favor of the truth of the claims made in the Bible.
And, that's why I don't believe in God. It is irrational to believe in something that we don't know exists.Seth wrote:
Once again, my only claim about God or anything else is that the ONLY rational conclusion anyone anywhere can draw about the existence or non-existence of God is "we don't know."
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Are you insinuating they aren't? May I suggest you attend the Grand Blot I'll hold in Gamla Uppsala next summer solstice? I warrant you'll hold the place of honour.Coito ergo sum wrote:Then following your line of reasoning, and using your logic, the preponderance of the evidence must be that the Poetic and Prose Edda are true. Is that correct?
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
I can answer that:Gawdzilla wrote:"What's your evidence that the transcription of events is false or incorrect? "
1. that there are dozens of different and inconsistent versions of various Bibles, such that if one is deemed completely correct, then others cannot be. They can't all be correct, so at most one version is the correct one, and there is no way to know (at present) which one is right. So, we know almost all of them are incorrect, and we don't know which one, if any, is correct.
2. We know that our current variety of Bible versions are cobbled together from a host of prior versions or "families" of texts that often had different tellings of the same stories. These include the Massoretic Texts, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, Dead Sea Scrolls, Proto-Alexandrian texts, Western texts, Byzantine texts ("Scrutiny of the Byzantine family reveals a multitude of small mistakes and numerous unexpected readings which seem unreasonable." (Dr. Laird Harris, Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible; Page 92)), Alexandrian Texts (includes Codex Ephraemi (Codex C), the Coptic Versions, and certain of the Alexandrian early church fathers) , and Caesarian Texts.
These different families of texts encompass thousands of documents, which differ in a variety of ways.
One might ask Seth what is the "critically robust" evidence that any one of these documents or families of documents is correct? But, in any case, we can see that the evidence that "the" transcription is incorrect is in the false premise of that question - the false premise is that there actually even is a transcription. We don't have one - we have different families of books which differ from each other and therefore we can't speak of one transcription, but we have to speak of many transcriptions.
So, what is the evidence that the many transcriptions are inaccurate? Well, logically if you have many transcriptions and those transcriptions are different from each other, then all of them except for - maybe, perhaps, and at most - one of them, can be correct. So, again, what is the critically robust evidence that some Byzantine text is correct, but a proto-Alexandrian text is not?
Before we can answer the question, "what is the evidence that the transcript is incorrect?" someone must first advance one version as correct with "critically robust" evidence.
I would also add that many of the stories within the Bible versions contain self-contradictory statements - i.e. tellings of the basic stories of the gospels in Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, contradict each other in some respects even within the same version of the Bible. It's like having the "testimony" of two witnesses recounted and then saying "all this testimony is true" even though those two witnesses contradict each other in some respects relative to the same stories. Obviously, the Bible would not be accurate, if there are inconsistencies, and there are.
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Do I get to bang a hot Swedish maiden before you garrote me and send me to the gods? Just want to make sure I have the procedure down pat...Svartalf wrote:Are you insinuating they aren't? May I suggest you attend the Grand Blot I'll hold in Gamla Uppsala next summer solstice? I warrant you'll hold the place of honour.Coito ergo sum wrote:Then following your line of reasoning, and using your logic, the preponderance of the evidence must be that the Poetic and Prose Edda are true. Is that correct?
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Part one of three:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIYP4_K ... re=related[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIYP4_K ... re=related[/youtube]
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Not garrotted, hanged and transfixed with a spear, I won't let you suffer too long.Coito ergo sum wrote:Do I get to bang a hot Swedish maiden before you garrote me and send me to the gods? Just want to make sure I have the procedure down pat...Svartalf wrote:Are you insinuating they aren't? May I suggest you attend the Grand Blot I'll hold in Gamla Uppsala next summer solstice? I warrant you'll hold the place of honour.Coito ergo sum wrote:Then following your line of reasoning, and using your logic, the preponderance of the evidence must be that the Poetic and Prose Edda are true. Is that correct?
As for the maiden, I'll have to ask a friend's sister if she'll lend me her daughter for the ceremony, or you'll have to do with a crone.
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Re: Catholic church at it again. This time Holland.
Key differences here: One, you're forgetting that deposition or trial testimony of a witness is generally NOT admissible in court to prove the truth of matters to which the person testified. If there is a retrial of a criminal defendant, for example, it is NOT allowed, generally speaking, to simply read into the new record the testimony from the first case, even if it was in open court and even if it was under oath. The original witness generally has to be called again and has to testify as a first person. So, if you want to use these courtroom analogies to screw with a scientific question, well, then you can't just go half-way.Seth wrote: Er, not Schneibster. Anyway...so, this eyewitness testifies in court that he saw somebody do something. That testimony is taken down by the court reporter and transcribed into the record of the proceedings. Over time, that record is recopied numerous times as the original copies deteriorate. Eventually, some skeptic down the road says "that's not eyewitness testimony because it's not from the mouth of the testator!" This is an example of unreason and illogic on the part of the skeptic.
Does that make the testimony any less eyewitness than it was when the testator spoke it in open court? No, of course it doesn't. It just means that the skeptic down the road doesn't believe the veracity of the transcription. And that being the case, it's up to the skeptic to provide critically robust evidence that the testimony was false or that the transcriptions were erroneous. Everybody else is fully entitled to say "I believe in the testimony as recorded originally and retranscribed."
You are flat out wrong that if a person takes a transcript from some trial testimony, that it is taken as accurate unless a person opposing the evidence presents "critically robust" evidence that the transcript is inaccurate. That's false, and is not the case in any jurisdiction in the western world, except for limited portions of it for "impeachment" purposes.
Now, in the case of the Bible - it's not testimony at all, so it's not under oath, and it doesn't purport to have been taken down by a court reporter (or equivalent). So, it would be more like a handwritten, unsworn statement by a witness, and as such that would never be admitted unless we had the writer there to authenticate the document and be cross-examined.
It's neither a recording, nor a transcription at all.Seth wrote:
You want to blithely dismiss that recording and transcription of first-person eyewitness testimony merely because you cannot yourself hear it from the mouth of the eyewitness and weren't yourself there to witness the event.
And, any of the claims made in the writing itself are only the retelling of statements made by non-eyewitnesses. It's person X, writing down what person Y told him that person Z told him that person A did or said (at best). That is NOT eyewitness, and it is certainly not "testimony."
What is your "critically robust" evidence that there is a God?
No, unless the believer can provide critically robust evidence of the truth of their claims, then it would be irrational to believe the claims.Seth wrote:
And unless the skeptic can provide that critically robust evidence of falsehood or error in the recording and transcription of the first-person claims, then the claim of falsehood or error can be dismissed without further consideration as unsupported by the evidence.
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